Summer In The City, 1951

    

     A summer day.
     I’m almost twelve.
     No school! Yea! I get out of bed real early. My mother wants to know how come I can’t do that on school days.
     I put on my dungees and lace up my smelly PF Flyer sneakers.
     Corn flakes for breakfast, and then I’m charging down the back stairs. Got to find Earl, or Butchie, or Ricky. Do stuff.
     But nobody’s around. Maybe their mothers took them someplace. Maybe they went swimming up at Charles River or on Carson Beach.
     It’s already getting hot, and I’m all by myself. It’s so hot that I can smell the heat coming out of the unpainted rotted planks on my porch.
     I’m thirsty. Wish I had a nickel. I’d get an ice cold bottle of Coca Cola and drink it all the way down without stopping. But I don’t have a nickel. Not even a penny. Maybe I can look around for some empty bottles to turn in at Dan’s Variety for two cents each. Or maybe I can look in the gutters, to see if anybody dropped any pennies. Sometimes you find coins covered with guck from where the cars were parked against the curb. Once I found a ten dollar bill on the ground. That was so much money that it scared me to have it, as though I had stole it. I took it to my mother. I don’t remember getting to spend it.
     It’s getting hotter and hotter. I got no money to buy tonic with, and nobody to play with.

   

     The building across the street is where grown-ups go every day to work. There’s no windows. Just a big black wall made out of humpy metal. I pick up a bunch of pebbles and pitch them at the humpy wall. It makes a pingy sound. But that’s not much fun. I go back and sit on the porch and think about that bottle of Coca Cola. Wish I had a nickel.
     Noon finally comes, and the horn blows from the shoe factory way up the street. It makes a loud tooty noise. Like a train sounds. When that horn goes off, that’s how I know what time it is. That’s how the days are divided in the summer. You hear that noise and you know that the morning is all done.
      I have to go in my house and have something to eat. It will probably be more cold cereal.
     It is.
     And then I go out again. I’m out in front of the house swinging myself around and around on the street post until I get dizzy. That’s dumb. There’s a big green water fountain at the end of the street, and water shoots up out of three faucets without stopping. I lean over one of the faucets and gulp down the cold water. But I don’t put my mouth on the faucet because once a grown-up saw me doing that and got real mad.
     Here comes Butchie.
     “Whatcha doing?” he says.
     “Nothin’”
     “Got a nickel?”
     “No. You?”
     Butchie shakes his head. He’s older than me. He’s twelve. He says, “If we could get a nickel, we could split a popsicle.”
     I like the purple ones. And when he says about a popsicle, I can see the sweet purple stuff slushing down the stick and over my fingers.
     “Ask your mother,” I say.
     “My mother ain’t going to give me no nickel for no popsicle.”
     Last night Butchie’s mother and father were sitting on their porch drinking lots of bottles of beer and talking mumbly and screaming at each other. Butchie’s father fell off his chair.
     “Want to go over to the showers?” I say.
     “Okay.”
     We go into our houses to put on our bathing suits. Mine is made out of wool, and it’s scratchy. I take off my socks, but put my sneakers back on because the sidewalk burns your feet.
     The showers is in the public housing project around the corner. It’s like a big round circle that you get in the middle of it, and water shoots up out of three places and comes down on your head. It’s like a giant size water fountain, and the water is like cold rain coming down on you, only it’s not raining. There’s always lots of kids running around and getting soaked. And you don’t have to pay any money.
     We stay at the showers till we get good and cooled off, and then we go back to our houses to take off our bathing suits.  I come out of my house first, and wait on my porch for Butchie to come back out. He lives up on the third floor in his house. His windows are open, and I can hear his father shouting at him, and then I hear something crash and I hear Butchie shriek. I’m waiting on the porch a long time, but Butchie doesn’t come outside again.
     I get a pile of comic books out of my house and sit on the porch reading Captain Marvel. That’s my favorite.

     The afternoon is almost half done, and Ricky Peet shows up. He tells me that his mother took him and his little brother on the boat to Nantasket Beach this morning, and he rode the dodgem cars and even got on the roller coaster. He says we should go see his father now.
     “He’ll give us some money for ice cream,” he says.
      Ricky’s father works in the factory on the other side of the humpy wall. He always has to wear a blue shirt and blue pants and he stands on a platform and loads stuff on trucks all day. He’s very skinny and he doesn’t live with Ricky and his brother and his sister.
      Mr. Peet doesn’t smile or talk much. Ricky says he was in the war and he got shot by the Japs.
     “Hi, Mr. Peet,” I say.
     He nods and gives Ricky some coins. “Go ahead now,” he says. “I got to work.”
     Ricky buys us both Creamsicles and we go around to the back of my house and sit on the stoop because that’s where the shade is now.
     Five o’clock comes and my mother yells for me to come up and eat supper. It’s peanut butter sandwiches, because my mother says it’s too hot for real food.
     At the kitchen table I always sit by the window which looks down into the back yard which is just a little hilly pit in back of three triple-decker houses. My little brother’s pal Ritchie lives in one of those houses. Ritchie has a sister who is thirteen, and sometimes she plays with us in the yard and I like to look at her because she’s really pretty. Sometimes we all play Cigarettes or Tag, and if Ritchie’s sister is going to be around I go into my bathroom and soak my hair and comb it and make a straight part.
     After supper the sun goes away and it gets cooler.
     Ricky Peet yells up my back stairway, “Hi yo, Paulie’s mother,” and when she goes out in the hall to shush him, he asks if I can come out to play and she says okay.
     “Let’s have a game of ball,” Ricky says. He already has a stick that was sawed off a broom handle, and a pink hollow pimple ball.
     A bunch of kids are around their houses and we end up with eight or nine guys. We play in the little lot next to Ricky’s house where there use to be another three-decker house just like his.
     Lots of nights in the summer we play ball in this field. It’s always with a rubber ball that we can’t hit very far with the broomstick. Sometimes the ball gets whacked into the street and we have to wait for the cars to go by to get it. Sometimes somebody bashes it right over to the house on the other side of the street and if it bounces off the wall that’s an automatic home run. A couple of times the ball hit a window but it didn’t break. The window, not the ball.
     We’re having fun playing ball, but it’s starting to get dark. When it’s so hot during the day, the time never seems to go by. But after supper when we’re having fun it always seems to get dark too fast.
     Ricky’s mother keeps walking back and forth behind the window on the second floor. Ricky thinks that any minute she’ll make him come in the house. Ricky’s sister Phyllis is up there too. She’s sitting at the window with her elbows on the sill, watching us. She’s a lot older than us. About seventeen. She’s beautiful and she always smells like flowers. I get all excited when I look at her. I want to hit home runs or make amazing catches. I want her to be watching me. Sometimes I think she is looking at me and liking me.
     Ricky told me that one time his mother was yelling at Phyllis and made her say if she was having intercourse with her boyfriend. I know what intercourse is. Well, sort of. But I never heard it called that before. What I heard it called is something you can’t say in front of grown-ups.
     When I look at Phyllis, I get all funny feelings. It makes me think of intercourse.